[ih] When did "32" bits for IP register as "not enough"?

[Craig Partridge]

On Fri, Feb 15, 2019 at 12:23 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 2:58 PM Craig Partridge <craig at tereschau.net>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> Dennis' decision to adopt TCP/IP for NSFNET was critical.
>>
> Hmmm.  It certainly did not hurt and I agree was cleafrly an amplifier and
> important.   But I'm not sure that was as important as the basic economics
> of the time -> Moore's Law and cheap cycles (i.e. I don't think the NFSNET
> choice, while helped the effect, was not the high order bit on the success
> function).
>
> This was the time of the beginning of the workstation wars and the
> dominate OS was UNIX and in particular BSD which came with a known working
> IP stack (as I said, the USG paid to have that written by BBN).   Other
> stacks were for BSD were available on the market and there were even OSI
> stack implementations to be found.
>
>
Important historical nit.  I was the manager of the BBN UNIX TCP/IP effort
after Rob Gurwitz left (I think Rob inherited it from Jack Haverty, but not
sure).  The BSD stack with sockets *was not written by BBN*.  It was
written by Bill Joy at Berkeley -- using the earlier BBN 4BSD code as a
reference.  Entirely new code, but originally bug-for-bug compatible
(indeed, years later, when a bug was found in the BSD TCP, the BSD folks
stood up and said "that's a bug from BBN").

Craig

> ᐧ
> ᐧ
>


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